The Prayer Book tradition of worship is rich and robust, providing not only rites and rituals for individual worship services but indeed for an entire life of Christian worship. As a part of this ambitious large-scale schema, it should come as no surprise that there’s more to worship than simply going to Holy Communion every Sunday morning. There are the daily rounds of prayer, punctuated by the [Great] Litany a couple times per week, various pastoral offices for key stages in the natural and spiritual lives of a congregation and family, and pointers toward the development of private devotions to enable the individual worshiper to flesh out his or her own life of worship apart from the gathered Church.

What is often missed in today’s church culture, however, is that the original Prayer Book pattern for worship on Sunday morning was actually a three-part affair: Morning Prayer, The [Great] Litany, and the Holy Communion. Until relatively recent times, all three of these were appointed to be said in every church every Sunday and Holy Day. Granted, this was often shortened in actual practice, and by the late 19th century it was probably more common for people to attend just one service rather than all three in a row. Yet the full pattern of worship is still present even in our modern Prayer Books, and the typical malnourished Christian of today could benefit greatly from a retrieval of the spiritual rigor of our forebears. To that end, we’ll be looking at different combinations of worship services that you could carry out on Sunday mornings in your church.

Morning Prayer & Holy Communion

The most complicated pairing of traditional Prayer Book services is that of Morning Prayer and Holy Communion. The American Prayer Book of 1928 hints of the concept of running the two services together but provides no rubrics on how this is meant to be done. The 1979 Prayer Book finally followed that up with a set of instructions: cut the Morning Prayer service off after the collects and before the Prayer for Mission, and then start the Offertory of the Communion liturgy (1979 BCP page 142). Additional Prayers might be expected in between, however, to ensure the requirements for the Prayers of the People be fulfilled. The practical result of this schema is that the Daily Office serves as the “Liturgy of the Word” within the Communion service.

However, the framers of the 2019 Prayer Book consciously and intentionally did not repeat that rubric. They asserted that the integrity of the Daily and Communion offices should be maintained, and there was nothing to be gained by blending them together like that. So now we have an interesting situation, because on pages 24 and 50 of our Prayer Book we still have the same rubric as in 1979: “Unless the… Eucharist is to follow, one of the following prayers for mission is added.” So if you want to combine Morning Prayer and Holy Communion into one worship service, the Office ends at the same place as it does for switching to the Litany, which is the same place the original Office ended, which is the same place as the 1979 Book to move on to the Offertory in Holy Communion. Except in our case, the “Liturgy of the Word” in Holy Communion can’t be overwritten. This leaves us with a curious range of options.

First, literally start at the very beginning of the Communion service. You could smooth the transition a little by singing a hymn to be the hinge: functioning both as the Anthem near the end of the Office and the Opening Hymn of the Eucharist. Needless to say this is the longest option in terms of the worship service’s duration. Though the other options aren’t going to be all that much shorter.

Second, skip everything you’re allowed to skip. If you want to remain obedient to the rubrics, but try your hardest to shorten this combined service, here are the things you can skip:

• The Confession in Morning Prayer
• The Apostles’ Creed in Morning Prayer
• The Gloria in Excelsis Deo in the Communion service
• The Comfortable Words and certain other marked prayers during the celebration of Communion

This is often overlooked by liturgy planners, but the real key to “saving time” when you’re concerned about a worship service lasting too long is not about breezing through the Prayers and skipping sections of the liturgy. The biggest time-user is music. This is especially true in the modern charismatic-influenced evangelical tradition – those songs can go on much longer even than the old hymns! So if you’re the sort who’s concerned about attention span and a set “finish time”, look at how you can reel in the music, rather than cut corners with the actual canonical liturgy.

That said, there is something to be said for the spirit of the rubrics rather than just the letter. Along those lines, here are some other things to consider to smooth the transition from Morning Prayer to Holy Communion and make it feel a bit more unified and a bit less repetitive.

• Use the Confession in Morning Prayer instead of the Communion (that way you can skip a bunch of the follow-up material, including that oft-time-consuming Peace!)
• Trim the Prayers of the People (after all Morning Prayer does have some basic intercessions built in already)
• Alternatively, chop off all the prayers from Morning Prayer (concluding it with the second lesson & canticle, and then moving on to the Communion. This way you get the benefit of the extra Scripture readings and none of the prayers thereafter which will get duplicated.)

In my early years as a priest, I tried out all three of those last ideas (possibly all at once). I did this on a couple festive Sundays of the year – Christmas, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Trinity, All Saints’ Sunday – for the benefit of getting two different collects of the day (in most of those cases) and extra Scripture lessons. I thought it’d be a good way to heighten the celebration of the high holy days in a way that was both Bible-centered and Prayer Book -honoring, analogous to how the especially penitential Sundays would be punctuated by the Great Litany.

Unlike my appointing of the Litany, however, the Morning Prayer + Holy Communion combo pack did not last. It’s significantly longer, it’s clunkier, and on the days that I appointed this there was usually a lot of wonderful music that we wanted to sing as well. It may be that the Office & Eucharist combination would work better in a low-music setting. It may be that this combination may better be achieved as two separated worship services with a time for Bible Study or Sunday School or Catechesis in between.

Or, hey, maybe you actually do want to plan a worship that’s 1½-2 hours long, and then a full Morning Office with a full Eucharist back-to-back is a perfectly Anglican way to achieve that!